Amazon has made a big splash over the past 6 years with their ever growing cloud services. Starting with virtual machines as a service and cheap object storage, to their “human as a service” via mechanical turk, what you can now accomplish with an API call from your laptop is pretty amazing. It’s created a shift in the industry in how we think about computing resources.

OpenStack is an Open Source Infrastructure as a Service layer, conceptually similar to some of the Amazon Web Services. Originally created by Rackspace and NASA to address their internal computing needs, it’s now grown into vibrant Open Source community that involves developers from Red Hat, Canonical, IBM, HP, Intel and many many more. It powers public clouds at Rackspace and HP, it’s powering infrastructure at Wikipedia, CERN, and Ebay.

Come out for a great night. You’ll learn about Cloud Computing in general, OpenStack in particular, and why and how you might want to get involved.

Sean Dague is the president and founder of MHVLUG. By day he’s a software engineer in IBM’s Linux Technology Center. By night he’s an open source hacker who is especially interested in web and mobile technologies. He’s presented in the past on numerous topics.